Taking non-sequitur plotting even further than Fargo’s already silly crime piece, Burn After Reading can almost be seen as the Coens thumbing their nose at No Country for Old Men’s academic reception. Although, in hindsight, No Country was not that different from the typical Coens screwball caper, the depth of Cormac McCarthy’s story in their award-grabbing film suddenly threw the Coens back into the Hollywood elite’s spotlight. If their mellow and nonchalant acceptance speeches at the Oscars weren’t enough of an indication, their decision to follow up a prestige picture with a blatantly empty and plotless comedy like Burn After Reading is a pleasant reminder that the brothers still don’t take themselves too seriously, and what a relief it is to see their unique brand of humor step into the foreground again.
In an age that ushered spy movies into an intensely serious and paranoid territory (let’s call it the Jason Bourne Syndrome)—an age that even got James Bond to graduate from people with names like Pussy Galore—Burn After Reading makes a farce of the genre that suggests a less-than-reliable intelligence game. A rather morbid happenstance: this dark trend in movies is often said to be 9/11’s fault, and I saw Burn After Reading on September 11th, seven years later. There’s no meaning to this. I just thought it was an appropriate counterattack to mark the date.
It seems foolish to try to describe the premise of the movie. All of the characters are connected to one another, often by coincidence, and no one really knows what the hell they’re doing or what’s going on. It’s a series of hilarious mistakes where, one by one, it’s revealed that the high-level intelligence game they believe they’re playing is not quite so high-level after all (or intelligent, for that matter). In your garden variety espionage story, usually everything’s somehow secretly connected and characters end up being more deceptive than they let on. Burn After Reading flips that convention on its head by having its various superficial characters intersect in manners as flippant as an out-of-nowhere chance meeting on a park bench. You never know where you are in the movie because the structure is deliberately all over the place. To add to the detached weirdness of it all, Burn After Reading’s ending borrows a page from No Country’s playbook by having the climax and resolution to its characters happen off-screen.
In a way, the Coens are suggesting that purposely indulging in unnecessary paranoia would only lead to a state of needless fear, ignorance and confusion. Harry (George Clooney) is a philandering Treasury agent who fears that he’s being targeted by covert agents, even though the riskiest business he’d ever gotten involved in is cheating on his wife. Chad (Brad Pitt, stealing the big laughs as a simple-minded exercise freak) and Linda (Frances McDormand) are two Hardbodies gym employees ignorant enough to believe that they can blackmail people after finding a CD containing the personal files of ex-CIA analyst Osborn Cox (John Malkovich), all just to get Linda cosmetic surgery—a shallow motive for a shallow plot. The film’s funniest detour, however, comes when Chad and Linda try to hock CIA secrets to the Russian government. “Russia?” asked the perplexed CIA Director (J.K. Simmons) when he found out. Why Russia? Because they’re good villains for spy thrillers, that's why. Nevermind that the Cold War is over, a fact quickly noted in the film by the Russians’ amusingly uncomfortable refusal to participate: “Is this line secure? How about we meet up to talk about this.” “Oh, umm, well, I’m kind of busy right now…”
Simmons’ head CIA honcho offers the best summation of this absurd film at the end, when he closes the file on the “incident” that transpired. Accepting that none of it made any logical sense, he offers the consolation “At least we learned not to do this again... Whatever the hell it was that we did.” Only the audience, as Godlike witnesses, can comprehend how one thing led to the next. By the end of the story, there’s no significant consequence and none of the characters learn anything. The treat is in the hysterical performances by the superb cast in the individual scenes that make up this entertaining romp.
"Burn After Reading" opens September 12, 2008 and is rated R. Comedy. Directed by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Written by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen. Starring Brad Pitt, George Clooney, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins.
